Emergency, urgent medical care to get a boost in Brockton area

Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton and the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center are both moving forward with plans for new, expanded emergency and urgent care wings.

Kyle Alspach

Whether it’s an emergency or just the flu, patients with urgent medical needs don’t want to wait days, or weeks, for an appointment with their doctor.

But at two major health providers for the Brockton area, treatment centers for immediate medical needs are swelling with an excess of patients.

Hopefully not for long, though. Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton and the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center are both moving forward with plans for new, expanded emergency and urgent care wings.

“The need for access to immediate health care is growing,” said Dr. Richard Herman, emergency department chairman at Good Samaritan. “Access to primary care is sometimes difficult, and certainly in this region the population is growing.”

At the hospital, design work is finished for a new 30,000-square-foot emergency department, which would triple the size of the current department.

At the Neighborhood Health Center, a 6,000-square-foot addition is planned for expanded urgent care services, which are provided for nonemergency needs such as flu, cold or ear ache.

Both projects will be presented to the Brockton Planning Board for site plan approval at a meeting at City Hall Oct. 6.

“When a patient’s in pain, they want to be seen today, not next Tuesday,” Herman said. “That’s the service that an emergency department or an urgent care center can offer.”

Statistics show that need for those services is rising in Massachusetts and nationwide.

The rate of emergency room visits per 1,000 Massachusetts residents jumped 12 percent between 1999 and 2007, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Nationally, the rate rose about 10 percent during that time period.

At Good Samaritan Medical Center, a new emergency department has been needed for a long time, though, hospital officials say.

The current department was built in 1968 to serve 25,000 patients a year. The unit is now cramped and crowded, serving 54,000 patients a year.

Good Samaritan treats residents from 19 local communities, with its primary service area consisting of Bridgewater, Brockton, Easton, Middleboro, Randolph, Stoughton, West Bridgewater and Taunton, said spokeswoman Monique Aleman.

“I think we do a pretty good job of handling the patients we see every year, but clearly we need to get modern,” Herman said.

The new emergency department will increase the number of rooms to 42 from the current 26, allowing patients to get a room more quickly, Herman said. All rooms will be private with a television and phone, he said.

The department will also be the region’s first to contain its own imaging suite for CT scans and X-rays, improving patient flows and cutting wait times, Herman said.

The new department, he said, is “going to be big — that’s the bottom line.”

Meanwhile, the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center is already ready for an expansion since opening its current building on Main Street in November 2007.

In particular, the center has already outgrown its urgent care unit. There were about 12,600 visits there in the last fiscal year, nearly doubling the number of visits the prior year, said executive director Sue Joss.

“We’re growing like crazy,” Joss said.

The project could break ground as soon as October and construction will take nine months, she said.

The health center mainly serves low-income residents, 75 percent of whom are from Brockton. Urgent care is only offered to current patients or to people who have no doctor and intend to become a patient of the health center, Joss said.

The $2 million project will be paid for through fundraising, federal grants — including stimulus money — and money left over from the loan for the current building.

At Good Samaritan, funding isn’t yet secured for the new $28.5 million emergency department.

Loans had been pledged by St. Louis-based health company Ascension Health, but that funding has fallen through due to the troubled financial markets, said Teresa Prego, spokeswoman for Caritas Christi Health Care, the parent company of Good Samaritan.

Now the hospital is looking to start a fundraising campaign, which could begin as soon as October if the Planning Board approves the project.

The goal is to combine fundraising with government grants and loan financing, Aleman said.

The one-story department would take just over a year for construction once financing is in place, Herman said.

Aleman said hospital officials are optimistic about the plans, saying that the fundraising campaign should have broad appeal.

“Raising money for an emergency department is something that everyone in the community can understand and relate to,” she said. “You want to know your local emergency department is going to be there for you.”